During The Kentucky Bourbon Festival, I obtained the recently released book noted above and written by Berkeley and Jeanine Scott. It contains great images releated to the 8 distilleries on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail. There are many early photographs of distilleries, master distillers, and various gentleman associated with the distilling industry. Some of my favorite photographs are: Col. E.H.Taylor, Taylor Williams (T.W.) Samuels, Albert Blanton, and Jim Beam. There is a photograph of Elmer T. Lee waiting to sample bourbon that Obie Kemper is getting from a barrel using a thief. Those that attended the barrel rolling competition may remember Obie Kemper and barrel "dancing". I think that it is a very interesting book with great old photographs.

The publisher, Arcadia, is here in Chicago. They have a great business going with these local history books. Here is a link to this book on the publisher's web site. They allow you to preview a pretty large chunk of the book.

The pictures are great but don't count too much on the text. For example, they say there are two Kentucky distilleries today that use pot stills, Woodford Reserve and Maker's Mark. Woodford does, Maker's does not.

Chuck,You are right about the text. I was looking at the book at the Getz Museum and noticed that they said that "OFC" stood for "Old Fire Copper" and the picture of an old label right next to the statement clear reads "Old Fashion Copper". They seemed a bit dumbfounded when I pointed this out told them the label is right.

Mike, I have alwys wondered about OFC. As you may know, a Canadian whisky is marketed to this day with that name, originally from the old Schenley plant in Valleyfield, Quebec but now being made in Lethbridge, Alberta at Constellation Brands' remaining plant there. The Quebec plant was sold to Diageo in 2008.

To the whisky journalists out there: how about interviewing Diageo or Constellation about moves in production sites? Are there any challenges in making, say, OFC in Alberta as opposed to Quebec? The distillation plant and aging environment can't be exactly the same. What about making Seagram's products (some anyway since Diageo still has the big plant in Gimli, Manitoba) in Valleyfield? Presumably these plants were always used for much more than whisky-distillation, so perhaps, say, all Canadian whisky in recent years from Constellation was made in Alberta, and perhaps correlatively Diageo is not using Valleyfield for whisky production. It would be interesting to get the facts on all this. Once again as so often in other contexts, Canadian whisky seems a little opaque, we don't know nearly as much about it as for bourbon.

Gary,Letters from E H Taylor Jr.'s letter book clear state that "OFC" is for "Old Fashioned Copper". I think the use of Old Fire Copper does not begin until after the Stagg takeover and the settling of the lawsuits from Taylor. At that point Stagg may have decided to start calling it "Old Fire Copper". The United Distillers Archive has plenty on the conversion to "OFC Canadian". If you check the OFC time line it will give you the dates and such on this conversion. They held a contest to come up with what "OFC" should stand for with the Canadian brand and the winner was "Oldest, Finest Canadian".

Okay thanks, Mike. Interesting that one sees an early association of age with quality in Canadian whisky, which is not necessarily so. Refining so much of contents of any Canadian whisky to near-neutrality makes aging (for any length of time anyway) redundant, but it seems this either was forgotten intramurally by distilleries or if remembered, they still used long aging claims, probably to satisfy preconceptions of consumers about what made for a quality whisky. Aging was originally an (expensive) way to rectify whiskey...